TW3 … and the empty NeoCon suit

August 13th, 2008

That Was The Week That Was … angst-driven and bloody [with yet another cannibalism reference. We've gone several weeks without. I noticed their preoccupation with same a few years ago ... they seldom fail me.]

Yer despicable comment for the day comes from Rush Limbaugh - gag!

Media Matters for America reports:

“Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk”

On the August 12 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh said of former Sen. John Edwards’ recent disclosure of an extramarital affair: “It just seems to me that Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk.” Limbaugh went on to say in a subsequent segment: “my theory that I just explained to you about why — you know, what could have John Edwards’ motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk.”

The Christocrats are praying for a Noah-inspired deluge to hit Denver just as Obama takes the stage; here’s a YouTube with their pitchman asking over and over, “Would it be wrong?” Jeeeeeez! If you have to ask, dude — it is. So I won’t tell you what I’d like to pray lands on Rush’s pointy head. What a cretin!

Bonus material is McRib inspired; it takes a mighty soul, dark and/or light, to gather together the threads of politics, potential policy and leadership, and shoot the rapids of campaign. McCain is waaaaay past the point where he has the capacity — and when even moderate FactCheck takes a politician to task over duplicity, it’s something of an all time low. The reads, each on a different topic, give us a window into the empty suit .. and we already know what Presidency-by-NeoConsensus looks like.

Do NOT miss the last article — as discussed yesterday, wag, wag, wag the dog! Pfffft!

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
August 12, 2008

Claiming that South Ossetian separatists had attacked its
villages, U.S. ally Georgia sent troops to capture the
city of Tskhinvali. Russia retaliated by sending ground
troops into Tskhinvali, then into Georgia proper; Georgia
claimed that hundreds of troops had been killed on both
sides along with “huge numbers” of civilians. Georgian
President Mikheil Saakashvili described Russia’s troop
actions as “the preplanned, cold-blooded, premeditated
murder of a small country.” The Olympics began in Beijing,
heralded on television by fake, computer-generated
fireworks. President George W. Bush told Bob Costas that
China “is a big, important nation…it is important for
this country to show respect for the people of the
country.” The International Court of Justice condemned
Texas for executing a Mexican national who had not been
advised of his right to consular assistance. “Texas,”
replied the office of the state’s attorney general, “is
not bound by the World Court.” Under pressure from
human-rights groups, Iran suspended death by stoning “for
now,” and a U.S. military jury in Guantanamo rejected the
30-year minimum sentence called for by the Bush
Administration and sentenced Salim Hamdan, Osama bin
Laden’s former driver, to five more months in prison atop
the 61 he has already served. Australian police reopened
7,000 investigations after realizing that they had mixed
up DNA samples and wrongly arrested a man for double
homicide and child rape, and Franz Kafka’s secret porn
stash was brought to light. “Animals committing fellatio
and girl-on-girl action,” said researcher James
Hawes. “It’s quite unpleasant.”

It was discovered that a woman who paid a South Korean
company to create five clones of her pitbull Booger was
Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who escaped British
authorities in 1977 after abducting a Mormon missionary,
securing him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs, and
raping him three times. “They are perfectly the same as
their daddy,” said McKinney, in Seoul, of Booger’s
clones. “I am in Heaven here.” After The National Enquirer
published pictures of John Edwards holding his “love
child,” Edwards admitted that he had had an affair with
actress Rielle Hunter in 2006 but said that he did not
love her and that her baby couldn’t be his. Novelist Jay
McInerney said that Hunter was the basis for Alison Poole,
a “cocaine-addled, sexually voracious” party girl who
appeared both in his novels and in Bret Easton Ellis’s
“American Psycho.” A poll by Lifetime Networks found that
women would prefer to carpool or vacation with Barack
Obama over John McCain by a factor of two to one. McCain
campaigned at a biker rally in South Dakota, at which
there is each year a beauty pageant that features topless
contestants performing fellatio upon bananas. “I
encouraged Cindy to compete,” he told a crowd. “I told her
with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to
serve as First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.” It was
revealed that days after McCain reversed his position on
offshore drilling to one of support, employees and family
members from Hess oil company gave his campaign
$285,000. In New Zealand a 111-year-old tuatara reptile, a
remnant from the age of dinosaurs, impregnated his partner
for the first time in decades. The lizard-like creature,
who now has three consorts, regained his interest in sex
after zoologists removed a cancerous growth from his
genitals.

A U.S. biologist in Barbados claimed to have discovered
the world’s smallest snake, which, at less than 4 inches
long, may be the smallest that snakes can possibly
be. Barbadians insisted that they already knew about the
animal, which they call a “thread snake.” Isaac Hayes, who
sang the theme song to “Shaft” (”Can you dig it?”), and
comedian Bernie Mac both died. Rwanda’s justice ministry
issued a report accusing France of participating in the
1994 genocide in Rwanda. “French forces directly
assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis,”
said a statement from the ministry. “French forces
committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors.” A survey
found 125,000 Western lowland gorillas living in a swamp
in Congo, double the number of the endangered primates
previously believed to exist; nevertheless, due to habitat
loss and human encroachment, said a report by the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature, almost
half of the world’s primate species are facing
extinction. The U.S. Army failed to censor a new medical
textbook that teaches updated military surgical practices
and depicts blast amputations, dead children, and a
suicide bomber’s rib embedded in a soldier. “There was
never any doubt in my mind that the Army would publish
this,” said Dr. Stephen P. Hetz, a retired colonel and the
book’s co-author. “It was just a matter of getting around
the nitwits.” Sharks were eating polar bears in the
Arctic, and Greyhound pulled an ad that read, “There’s a
reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage,’” after a
Greyhound passenger on the TransCanada highway beheaded
and ate his seatmate. At least 38 Venezuelan Warao Indians
had died of rabies after being bitten by vampire
bats. “Vampire bats are very adaptable,” said a rabies
researcher. “Homo sapiens is a pretty easy meal.”

– Chantal Clarke
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/WeeklyReview2008-08-12

snipped from: Media Matters of America
Jamison Foser
8/1/08

Over the past few weeks, and especially the past week, numerous news organizations and other neutral observers have debunked a series of false claims made by John McCain and his campaign.

FactCheck.org, for example, has called one McCain attack ad “false,” said another contains a “false” insinuation, described another as misleading, called another “ridiculous” and added, “That’s absurd, and McCain knows it.” FactCheck said the attacks in yet another McCain ad are “oversimplified to the point of being seriously misleading,” noting that by the standards of evidence the McCain campaign used in the ad, the Arizona senator himself could be criticized precisely the same way. FactCheck called criticisms McCain has leveled against Obama’s tax plans “bunk,” adding, “He’s wrong,” and stating that McCain is using a “false and preposterously inflated figure” to attack Obama. They called another McCain attack “simply wrong” and “not true.” They said yet another McCain ad “gets nearly all its facts wrong. … [E]very number in the ad is wrong, except one. … And even that number is rounded upward so generously as to flunk third-grade arithmetic.” And FactCheck called yet another McCain attack “trickery” based on an “inflated and misleading” number that was the result of “Double, Triple and Quadruple Counting.” ++

Eight Strikes and You’re Out
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT
August 12, 2008

John McCain recently tried to underscore his seriousness about pushing through a new energy policy, with a strong focus on more drilling for oil, by telling a motorcycle convention that Congress needed to come back from vacation immediately and do something about America’s energy crisis. “Tell them to come back and get to work!” McCain bellowed.

Sorry, but I can’t let that one go by. McCain knows why.

It was only five days earlier, on July 30, that the Senate was voting for the eighth time in the past year on a broad, vitally important bill — S. 3335 — that would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems.

Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

“McCain did not show up on any votes,” said Scott Sklar, president of The Stella Group, which tracks clean-technology legislation. Despite that, McCain’s campaign commercial running during the Olympics shows a bunch of spinning wind turbines — the very wind turbines that he would not cast a vote to subsidize, even though he supports big subsidies for nuclear power.

Barack Obama did not vote on July 30 either — which is equally inexcusable in my book — but he did vote on three previous occasions in favor of the solar and wind credits.

The fact that Congress has failed eight times to renew them is largely because of a hard core of Republican senators who either don’t want to give Democrats such a victory in an election year or simply don’t believe in renewable energy.

What impact does this have? In the solar industry today there is a rush to finish any project that would be up and running by Dec. 31 — when the credits expire — and most everything beyond that is now on hold. Consider the Solana concentrated solar power plant, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix in McCain’s home state. It is the biggest proposed concentrating solar energy project ever. The farsighted local utility is ready to buy its power.

But because of the Senate’s refusal to extend the solar tax credits, “we cannot get our bank financing,” said Fred Morse, a senior adviser for the American operations of Abengoa Solar, which is building the project. “Without the credits, the numbers don’t work.” Some 2,000 construction jobs are on hold.

Roger Efird is president of Suntech America — a major Chinese-owned solar panel maker that actually wants to build a new factory in America. They’ve been scouting the country for sites, and several governors have been courting them. But Efird told me that when the solar credits failed to pass the Senate, his boss told him: “Don’t set up any more meetings with governors. It makes absolutely no sense to do this if we don’t have stability in the incentive programs.”

One of the biggest canards peddled by Big Oil is that, “Sure, we’ll need wind and solar energy, but it’s just not cost effective yet.” They’ve been saying that for 30 years. What these tax credits are designed to do is to stimulate investments by many players in solar and wind so these technologies can quickly move down the learning curve and become competitive with coal and oil — which is why some people are trying to block them.

As Richard K. Lester, an energy-innovation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes, “The best chance we have — perhaps the only chance” of addressing the combined challenges of energy supply and demand, climate change and energy security “is to accelerate the introduction of new technologies for energy supply and use and deploy them on a very large scale.”

This, he argues, will take more than a Manhattan Project. It will require a fundamental reshaping by government of the prices and regulations and research-and-development budgets that shape the energy market. Without taxing fossil fuels so they become more expensive and giving subsidies to renewable fuels so they become more competitive — and changing regulations so more people and companies have an interest in energy efficiency — we will not get innovation in clean power at the scale we need.

That is what this election should be focusing on. Everything else is just bogus rhetoric designed by cynical candidates who think Americans are so stupid — so bloody stupid — that if you just show them wind turbines in your Olympics ad they’ll actually think you showed up and voted for such renewable power — when you didn’t. ++

Buying into the Spin about McCain’s Foreign Policy Credentials
Madison Powers, CQ Today
Aug. 13, 2008

Woody Allen once said that 90% of success in life is just showing up. Social scientists have known that this is true especially for some people. No matter how much knowledge, talent, or basis for credibility some people have in comparison to others, they often get unearned extra credit for what they say and do. They are judged to be smarter, more knowledgeable, and more trustworthy than others, even when it is not at all clear that any of these comparative judgments are deserved.

John McCain may well be one of those people when it comes to his reputation for foreign policy expertise.

Who gets unearned extra credit? Other things being equal, people who are taller or who have baritone voices are two such groups. Women who have read books of the “dress for success” genre know this story quite well.

Some recently reported studies show that men who have softer, rounder facial features rather than men who look more rugged and sexually self-confident tend to induce greater confidence among investors. The latter presumably have better success in other areas, of course, but who knows?

People who are simply more familiar to an audience generally gain a similar advantage. People get extra credit for just being around long enough, even if they really have done very little to earn the elder statesman title.

Just look at some of the ways the media have dealt with John McCain ’s claims to special expertise on foreign policy.

The conflict between Georgia and Russia gave the press another opportunity to give McCain credit where credit is not due. David Broder on “Meet the Press” was emphatic when he pronounced McCain as prescient in his assessment of the renewed threat posed by growing Russian imperialism and the autocratic tendencies Putin has displayed.

This is not exactly news, however. Articles in the mainstream press have been making these observations for years. The only obvious difference is that they weren’t made in interviews with David Broder, which is the subtext of Broder’s “gush to judgment.” To repeat what so many have been saying for so long is not a sign of being prescient. It merely shows that the speaker is sentient.

ABC’s John Hendren was similarly complimentary. “And when hostilities erupted along the Georgia-Russia border, McCain was characteristically bold and quick to act.”

Let’s be clear here. McCain was quick to speak, not act. There is a world of difference between the two, even if some can’t tell the difference. How else would McCain go unchallenged when he says he knows how to win wars. I may know how to build a gazebo, but that doesn’t mean I have actually built one (or would want to).

As for whether what McCain says is bold or merely intemperate is not so clear. For someone who may well have to proceed as a diplomat, rather than as a gadfly, it is open to question just what sort of rhetoric will serve him well when negotiating with one’s enemies is often made unnecessarily more difficult by incautiously made snide remarks about someone whom you later have to sit across the table from.

In contrast to President Bush’s ill-fated assessment of Putin (he looked into his eyes and saw his soul), McCain famously quipped that he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw three letters ‘K, G and B’. ” A clever line to be sure, but if uttered by a sitting president, most observers would likely label it a gaffe. You want this on the record about as much as Hillary Clinton wants her “McCain has a record and Barack has a speech” remark out while trying to make nice in support of the party nominee.

Others in the media just repeat the platitudes being peddled by McCain aides. Both Politico’s Jonathan Martin and The Hill’s Walter Alarkon quote well-placed partisans who affirm the common media assumption that the “Russian invasion” will help McCain. Really?

Will it help him in any way other than by the fact that the media can be counted on to buy into the spin and not really think seriously about how the crisis was initiated and how that bears on the appropriate response?

In particular, the bit about the Russian invasion gets left all too murky in the coverage.

McCain’s more bellicose remarks on Russian imperialism shows him to be on top of what is going on in the Georgian-Russian conflict only on the assumption that the clearly disproportionate Russian response is the whole story.

Early weekend coverage of the origins of the conflict by Tony Karon in Time demonstrate the extent to which events on the ground are grossly misunderstood if the entire focus is on the Russian’s share of the blame.

What the Karon story so nicely summarizes – for those of us who are not sophisticated foreign policy wonks – are the factors that have contributed to Georgia’s own military first strike and how years of US foreign policy may have contributed to their miscalculations in testing Russian resolve.

While political commentators compare Obama and McCain on their initial responses to the crisis and conclude that Obama comes off as more restrained and more circumspect, failure to discuss any of the background of the conflict leaves it open for readers to assume that the facts don’t warrant a nuanced response. Much of the political reporting of how the candidates have handled this issue thus far assume that a sabre-rattling tone is somehow a mark of foreign policy sophistication.

The media coverage of the Georgia story and its implications for the campaign simply reaffirms what many have been saying all along. McCain gets a pass on his growing list of foreign policy statement gaffes. The speculation from many quarters is that Obama would have been roasted if he had confused Sunnis with Shias in Iraq or referred to Czechoslovakia long after it had ceased to exist.

The question is why that differential treatment occurs. The explanation, I think, is simple. McCain gets extra credit for what he does get right and loses no credit even when he gets it wrong. He benefits from a presumption that he knows what he is talking about, so much so that he goes unchallenged even when it is obvious that he does not. ++

Madison Powers is Senior Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University.

John McCain’s Panic Attack
P.M. Carpenter, BuzzFlash
Wed, 08/13/2008

I didn’t see it – I do, after all, have some standards – but the Washington Post reports in so many words this morning that the fighting John McCain appeared on Fox News yesterday in an apocalyptic fever and, no doubt, with an extreme case of under-the-table tumescence.

“We’ve seen this movie before in Prague and Budapest,” intoned the senator about the Russian-Georgian conflict. “And I’m not saying we are reigniting the Cold War, but, this is an act of aggression in which we didn’t think we’d see in the 21st century.”

Yes, John, we have seen this movie before, but in Peoria, Portland and Pensacola. It was a 1950s horror flick starring the likes of every jingoistic Joe McCarthy whose only political lifeline was the promotion of paranoia and fear of domestic reason.

Oh, and a level of hypernationalistic hypocrisy that would knock even a McCarthyite’s socks off.

You really didn’t think we’d see an act of aggression like this in the 21st century, John? You, a U.S. senator who helped inaugurate this century with the champagne launching of America’s single most aggressive, unprovoked act of international roguery in its history?

When I read the formidably hyperbolic senator’s comments as bellowed on Fox News for the benefit of all the little Fox Newsies, my first thought was, There … there’s a fresh talking point of attack for the Obama campaign nicely packaged with a bow on it and everything: Senator McCain not only overreacts, he not only lacks a proportional sense of recent history, but let’s face it – he panics.

He’s not really panicking, of course. No, he’s just pandering, playing to the lowest emotions of the lowest-information voters who are barely aware or even unaware that the Soviet Menace imploded nearly one score ago. And if you think that’s a cynical exaggeration, just recall that Mr. McCain himself can’t seem to remember that Czechoslovakia no longer exists.

So he’s not panicking, he’s pandering. But what’s wrong with a little creative reframing amidst the opportunistic exigencies of a political campaign? After all, throughout the summer McCain has been engaged in the abundantly distorted framing of Barack Obama, and few in the media have seemed to mind.

As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported this week, “More than anything, Mr. McCain has used this [summer] to seek a thematic spine of the campaign he intends to run against Mr. Obama” – a quintessentially Republican campaign, that is, packed full of immature inanities about Obama as the “frothy celebrity,” Obama as “different,” Obama as “alien,” Obama as the “elitist,” Obama as “effete,” even (my favorite) Obama as “fussy.”

And my favorite comeback? It was from Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who said of McCain’s thematic riff on his employer’s elitism: “Obviously, his strategists met on the portico of the McCain estate in Sedona — or maybe in one of his six other houses — and decided what line of attack they were going to use.”

What Nagourney did not report, however – and I understand, he really likes having a job – is that McCain’s developing attacks are wholly vacant of plain, simple honor, the one theme which McCain, with Annapolis-cadet solemnity, had earlier pledged above all.

So, it’s going to be like that, is it? Well, so be it. This is America, and this is American politics, and in it there is absolutely nothing so conceivably low or dishonorable or detached from reality that can’t be successfully hustled. I mean, Jesus, look who just went to the Olympics representing our peculiar brand of psychotic democracy.

Which corrals my attention back to the matter of Mr. McCain’s rather severe case of unsteady nerves. The poor man, one international dust-up – a mere dust-up, for sure, compared to what we’ve been doing around the globe – and he panics. He melts into paranoid, apocalyptic visions of Cold War scale, while frantically misperceiving a long-standing border conflict as another Czechoslovakian 1968 or Hungarian 1956.

It’s sad, but clearly his nerves are shot and his perspective is gone. What we’re witnessing in Mr. McCain isn’t determined strength, but septuagenarian panic. Or so the Obama campaign could calmly and coded-ly say, should it ever reciprocally decide to grow a “thematic spine” of its own. ++

Georgia war is a neocon election ploy
Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

[thanks, Christine]

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government, ending his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. Iraq invasion.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which clearly was expected to produce a Russian counter-reaction. It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain’s presidential campaign.

In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia’s membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate’s foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, it was Putin’s Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Hussein to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But it will provide the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that ramps up its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Joseph Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union. McCain has condemned a “revanchist Russia” that should once again be contained. Although Putin has been the enormously popular elected leader of post-Communist Russia, it is assumed that imperialism is always lurking, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russian people.

How convenient to forget that Stalin was a Georgian, and indeed if Russian troops had occupied the threatened Georgian town of Gori, they would have found a museum still honoring their local boy, who made good by seizing control of the Russian revolution. Indeed five Russian bombs were allegedly dropped on Gori’s Stalin Square on Tuesday.

It should also be mentioned that the post-Communist Georgians have imperial designs on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What a stark contradiction that the United States, which championed Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, now is ignoring Georgia’s invasion of its ethnically rebellious provinces.

For McCain to so fervently embrace Scheunemann’s neoconservative line of demonizing Russia in the interest of appearing tough during an election is a reminder that a senator can be old and yet wildly irresponsible. ++

Robert Scheer is author of a new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves